What happens when you take the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X video card with the Fiji GPU and disable 512 or 12.5% of the stream processors? You end up with the lower cost AMD Radeon R9 Fury video card that should still perform well on most game titles at the most demanding resolutions. It's been over seven months since we have looked at any Radeon R9 Fury card and there has been a bunch of new games that have come out since then as well as the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers. We had the opportunity to take a look at the XFX Radeon R9 Fury Graphics Card that is sold under part number R9-Fury-4TF9 and jumped at the chance to take a look at it!

I didn't even bother because it didn't even pass the game testing from my point of view. A $529 video card that crashes on some game titles randomly and then stutters on others? I had a much smoother and more enjoyable gaming experience on the Radeon R9 Nano (full featured GPU) and the Radeon R9 390 8GB and both cost far less. Remember this is a card that has been out 6+ months, so big issues like this are inexcusable.

Something just isn't 100% right with this card. I just hope it isn't something like the GeForce GTX 980/970 memory issue that happened with they disabled things on the GPU and wasn't fixable since it was a hardware plumbing issue.

sbohdan wrote:I see. Do you think it's a hardware or driver issue? Or maybe just a faulty sample?

I think it's a number of issues from drivers to Windows. I hope it's not hardware, but my Nano and Fury X don't do it, so it could be as this core has things disabled. AMD told me its not a faulty card as they can duplicate the issue.

If you load driver Catalyst version 15.11 you can get rid of most problems w/ this card. (The Tesselation problem in 1 game is still present, and a driver issue, not a card issue)
As well as going into Catalyst and enabling over drive, and setting a max core temp of 52*C (which by the way only increases the smoothness of the card without any effect on frame rate) by stopping the thermal throttling the card experiences when allowed to just heat up to it's max temp. (Which you can clearly see in your screen shot) I've also seen no difference in performance between 52*C and 65*C at all.

Your review is horrible. It does not seem that you've taken any time to try and attempt to resolve any issues.

kil7witch84 wrote:Your review is horrible. It does not seem that you've taken any time to try and attempt to resolve any issues.

Had to chime in here.... a reviewer should not have to resolve anything. I am pretty sure if he would have had the time on his own he would have played around and tried to get it working better but for a review, what you get is what you review, there is no resolving.

If you review restaurants would you "fix" the food you dont like or report it as it came out to you?

A card this expensive should be 100% out of the gate and if it is not then it should be delayed to fix the problems before using reviewers/users at beta testers.

kil7witch84 wrote:Your review is horrible. It does not seem that you've taken any time to try and attempt to resolve any issues.

Had to chime in here.... a reviewer should not have to resolve anything. I am pretty sure if he would have had the time on his own he would have played around and tried to get it working better but for a review, what you get is what you review, there is no resolving.

If you review restaurants would you "fix" the food you dont like or report it as it came out to you?

A card this expensive should be 100% out of the gate and if it is not then it should be delayed to fix the problems before using reviewers/users at beta testers.

*This is not the opinion of Nate or Legit Reviews, just my own

That makes sense. But in all honesty, anyone with a half a brain should know that technology this new is going to have problems.

I guess all I was looking to do here was add some actual information after the fact that may be helpful to users reading the review. (Kind of like fixing the food at a restaurant when their chef screws it up.)

Following your logic, if I purchase a new car, that is also a new design, it's OK if it just breaks down on my trip home from the vendor, since new technology is known to do that? This is realy stupid. How about a newly designed house, that collapses on you and your family? OK too I suppose. Eh.

kil7witch84 wrote:If you load driver Catalyst version 15.11 you can get rid of most problems w/ this card. (The Tesselation problem in 1 game is still present, and a driver issue, not a card issue)
As well as going into Catalyst and enabling over drive, and setting a max core temp of 52*C (which by the way only increases the smoothness of the card without any effect on frame rate) by stopping the thermal throttling the card experiences when allowed to just heat up to it's max temp. (Which you can clearly see in your screen shot) I've also seen no difference in performance between 52*C and 65*C at all.

Your review is horrible. It does not seem that you've taken any time to try and attempt to resolve any issues.

Sorry you feel the review was horrible. I tried to resolve the issue with AMD in early February when I brought up the performance issues I ran into. They confirmed the issue and made it sound like a fix would be coming quick... I waited weeks and there was no fix, so I posted the review. After the review went public.

In Catalyst 16.1.1 the folks at AMD thought the issue was fixed... And this fix was seen in the release notes:

[85263] Clock speeds may be seen to fluctuate during gaming on some AMD R9 Fury series products leading to poor performance and/or screen corruption

The problem was found again through my testing and became a known issue again in Catalyst 16.2 in the release notes. Oddly, AMD released the new driver while I was waiting for quick fix, so at this point in time I was suggested to posted my review:

Core clocks may not maintain sustained clock speeds resulting in choppy performance and or screen corruption

It was fixed according to AMD in Catalyst 16.3 drivers that came out on March 9th I believe.

Core clocks may not maintain sustained clock speeds resulting in choppy performance and or screen corruption (Fixed with new Power Efficiency feature toggled to off)

This did improve some of the issues we had, but we still had corruptions in Rise of the Tomb Raider and Star Wars Battlefront. So, to say we took no time to resolve this issue is wrong. I worked with AMD closely, brought the issue to light and they said to go ahead and do what I got to do with the review as there was no solid date for a driver fix. It ended up coming a couple weeks later, but what you didn't know is that we were working with AMD since early February on the issue. Drivers are getting a bit more complicated now that game developers are able to get so close to the metal when they program games and then there is Windows and DX12 to worry about. I still stand by my initial thoughts though as it's a pass and seeing the leaked performance numbers for the GeForce GTX 1080 versus the price paid and issues for the Fury card... I think most people would tend to agree.

I'll go back and check for issues with the latest drivers when I am updating my numbers for the GeForce GTX 1080 review.

sbohdan wrote:Following your logic, if I purchase a new car, that is also a new design, it's OK if it just breaks down on my trip home from the vendor, since new technology is known to do that? This is realy stupid. How about a newly designed house, that collapses on you and your family? OK too I suppose. Eh.

Actually your cars and home are designed and built using OLD technology. Developed for YEARS before you even see it. But I like your enthusiasm.

I actually was really making my comment to provoke a response. I truly appreciate your follow up. I did also run into the issues you found as I started to play with settings. And at this point, it is spot on. Sometimes I go about prying for information in odd ways.

sbohdan wrote:Following your logic, if I purchase a new car, that is also a new design, it's OK if it just breaks down on my trip home from the vendor, since new technology is known to do that? This is realy stupid. How about a newly designed house, that collapses on you and your family? OK too I suppose. Eh.

Actually your cars and home are designed and built using OLD technology. Developed for YEARS before you even see it. But I like your enthusiasm.